okay thank you guys for joining us for module and in this module we will be discussing how to use the load boards how to find uh drivers and trucks and how to negotiate rates and you guys want to listen intently to this particular uh module it is uh critical and crucial to your everyday duties. This is not something you will utilize every once in a while. This will be a everyday part of your normal routine. So again, module twenty one, how to find the trucks, how to effectively negotiate the rates and how to use the load boards. OK. Welcome back to another video. In this chapter, guys, we are going to be covering how to use load boards, okay? We're also going to cover finding trucks and also talk about negotiating tactics. So let's jump right into this video. I'm going to be using DAT and TruckStop for this video, okay? I want to give you guys visuals of how to negotiate your loads with carriers and or dispatchers. Okay, so let's take a hypothetical situation. Let's say that a shipper, you have a shipper in Dallas and your shipper has called you up and said, hey, I have a load that I need you to pick up today out of Dallas that needs to go over to Atlanta, Georgia. you know, how much are you going to charge me for that? You know, you might have that, or you may have shippers that sometimes tell you what they are going to pay for that load. Okay. So you have to be prepared for both sides. And if a shipper tells you, um, gives you a rate that is ridiculously low, don't take that load guys. Don't, um, you know, brokers have to take a stand because we're kind of the backbone of how this all plays out, you know? Um, Carriers know what the market rates are, okay? They're able to see those through the load boards. So they know what should be considered a fair rate for the lanes, okay? And they are depending on you as the broker to try to negotiate a good rate with your shipper, okay? I know a lot of brokers don't necessarily realize how important their role is You know, a lot of new brokers that come into this industry, they are just trying to feed their families, you know, or or pay their bills. And what happens is when you have that type of mentality, you are willing to take literally pennies on the dollar for for freight. Okay. And shippers know that. And what happens is shippers are always going, not always, but a shipper's job is to, you know, a traffic manager's job is to find the best rates for the lanes so that they can save their company's money. That's their job, guys. So, you know, at some point we all are going to kind of have to take a stand And if shippers are trying to offer us pennies on the dollar for rates, and then we have to then take those pennies on the dollar and then try to divide those pennies on the dollars with the carriers, it just makes for a bad situation for everybody. It really does. So if you find yourself in a situation where you have a shipper that's just being extremely cheap or frugal, and it's trying to pay you pennies on the dollar, you need to get to a point where you can say, you know, that's going to be a little bit rough. Do you have any wiggle room at all? Because I really want to get this moved for you. And I want to get a carrier that I know is going to be responsible with your load and that's not going to have any issues. Um, with the transport in, you know, is there just, do you have a little more wiggle room? You have to be able to do that with shippers. Okay. Even if it means you possibly losing that shipper. Okay. Um, I know you're like, well, why in the world would I do that? Well, here's the thing guys, you know, you can take, you can take, um, low paying freight, but trust me, the headache of trying to get that freight to move is really not worth it. It's really not. You wanna be able to take that freight from the shipper, put that freight out on the load board and your phone should start blowing up instantly. If you have even a half decent rate, your phone should start blowing, unless the load is in some crazy area where drivers don't travel to, which is a great portion of the West, OK, which you should also know from this course. But if you have good freight in a good area that's paying halfway decent from the time you post that load, your phone should be blowing up. OK. And if it's not, that is a problem. That means that you then have to start making calls and searching and begging and pleading for drivers to take your freight. you know, which may, they may or may not take. And then which case you have to go back to the shipper and say, you know what, I couldn't do it, you know? So I say all this to say without getting too preachy, um, you know, it may take some time, but make sure that, um, you're doing your best to accumulate good shippers with fair prices. Okay. That's that's pretty much what I'm getting at in this whole little spill that I've just given. All right. So anyway, getting back to this chapter, let's say you have a shipper in Dallas and he's like, hey, I've got a load that's going to Atlanta, Georgia, and it's going to pay two hundred bucks. I mean, I'm sorry, two thousand bucks. I need you to try to move it for me. OK, so we're going to go in here. Dallas to Atlanta. Okay. So right now, and oh, I'm sorry. And let's say it's for a flatbed or a step deck. For an open trailer, it can go on a flatbed or a step deck, okay? And that lane, the current market rate on that lane is two thousand dollars, okay? And the shipper is telling you that he wants to pay you two thousand dollars to move that lane? Well, let's first off see if that is feasible for us to do. I'm sorry. Let me pull out my handy dandy calculator over here. Okay. So keeping in mind this, as a broker, we want to try to maintain profit margins of minimum We don't want to take too much because obviously the carrier is the one doing, you know, majority of the work. But what is fair for a broker's compensation should be between ten percent and fifteen percent. Final exam question. OK, so knowing that ten to fifteen percent, if the shipper is paying us two thousand dollars, OK, What's ten percent of ten of two thousand guys? going to be two hundred dollars right so let's look at this right here this is called the broker carrier spot so this is what brokers are pretty much paying carriers right now for this lane brokers are paying carriers about two thousand dollars for this lane so if your shipper pays you two thousand dollars for the lane are you going to be able to pay a driver two thousand dollars of course not you in order to do that you would need the shipper to pay you twenty two hundred dollars right So that means that we may have difficulty possibly, possibly getting our ten percent, I'm sorry, ten percent profit margin. However, this is what we need to pay attention to. This two fifty five here, guys, that is the market average. The lower end of it is two twenty two. OK, so carriers are paying anywhere between two twenty two to two seventy three for the lane. OK. so let's figure out if we were to pay this um carrier eighteen hundred dollars for this load give ourselves two hundred dollars what would that pay the carrier let's see if it would be in between what this lane is going for okay so what would the way that we would do that is we would take the rate that we're paying the carrier which is going to be eighteen hundred dollars OK, that's what we're looking to pay a carrier divided by whatever the miles are, which you see here. The trip miles is seven hundred and eighty four miles. Right. So we are going to divide. Eighteen hundred. A seven eighty four. By seven eighty four. That leaves us with two dollars. I'm sorry. That is that makes the trip. two dollars and twenty nine cents per mile okay so let's come back over here so minimum is two twenty two two twenty nine is slightly above what the minimum is so it is very very much possible that we could probably sell this for eighteen hundred and get people to call the phone pretty quickly once we put it out on the load board. If the shipper is willing to pay us two thousand dollars, that's pretty doable. We should be able to work with that and still make our ten percent minimum profit margin of two hundred dollars with that rate that the shipper is paying us. So I just want you to understand how the mathematics behind that works. You want to always make sure that whatever the shipper is offering to pay you, that you're going to be able to get your ten percent profit margin out of that payment. OK, bare minimum. So we'll tell the shipper, OK, you know what? Yeah, we should be able to do that. And he will give you the load. You'll then come out here. You'll load up for eighteen hundred. Well, so let's discuss that. You can put the load up for eighteen hundred. Is that in your best interest? Probably. Yes and no. And the reason for that is this. Typically in this industry, the way that these transactions work. is that when you place a load out on the load board and the carrier or dispatcher is calling you for that load, they're nine times out of ten going to always, always, always ask for more, okay? So knowing that they are going to always ask for more, you want to give yourself a little wiggle room for negotiation purposes. Okay. So what you would want to do instead of, you know, knowing in your mind, you're going to likely pay eighteen hundred dollars to whoever calls the book this load. But also knowing that they are likely going to ask for more. You want to start your rate. slightly lower you know by about a hundred bucks okay so what you would want to do is come out here and place the load on the load work for seventeen hundred dollars okay post the load they're going to call okay and they're gonna say hey I see you've got this load out here Do you have any room? Or they'll say, do you have any room for a little more? Or is this the absolute best you have on it? From that point, you can say, you know what? I've got a little bit. I could probably go to seventeen fifty. OK, something like that. Now, they may be OK with that. They may take that and say, cool, we can do it. And then guess what? You just made two hundred and fifty dollars. OK, profit margin, which is great. I'm sorry. Two hundred and fifty dollars, not profit margin. You're you made a two hundred and fifty dollar profit. Um, so they, you know, they may say, well, we can work with that. Or they may say, you know, they say, okay, well, let me call my driver. They call the driver. The driver says, no, we, they, he needs a little more. You can offer up that last fifty. Okay. And say, well, look at the very, the best, the absolute best I can do is eighteen hundred. Okay. And then they say, yay or nay. you know, and then let it go from there, especially if you're getting a lot of calls on the load, okay? Now, if you're in a situation where that rate is not the best or it's not going to the best area, then maybe you have to come off a little more, you know, and not meet your ten percent profit margin. Maybe you might have to make a nine percent profit margin on that one, okay? So there's all type of ways to negotiate this. But when you are negotiating, you definitely want to do your best to stay within that ten to fifteen percent profit margin, no matter what. It will not always work out like that. But as long as the majority of your loads are in that margin, then you're doing a great job. OK, you're doing a great job. So that's how this works. In the event that you need to look for a truck, let's say you just, you know, you've got a bad load on your hands, the phone isn't ringing, nobody wants it, you may have to do some extra legwork and you may have to start searching for a truck. So then you would want to come out here, okay, and you would want to type in whatever type of trailer you're looking for. Again, this one, this particular load is for flatbeds and step decks. Okay. And then we are going to put in the origin of Dallas. Now we could stop there. Oh, well, we could put in, we probably need to put in whatever the weight is. Let's say this is a So we want to make sure that whatever trucks we're looking at can scale, can haul at least forty thousand pounds. And whatever the available date of the load is, that's what we're going to put here. Now, we could stop here. Oh, and then, you know, Deadhead, you should know about this from prior chapters in the course. It just means how far out the truck is, how far out they're willing to travel to pick up the load. And then if they're going to a certain destination, how far they're willing to deliver from that destination. So you know me, I would probably look for trucks within a hundred and fifty miles or less of the pickup. So that could stay just like that. Now we could search from here or if we wanted to include the destination, that would show people that are around Dallas, Texas that are trying to get to Atlanta, Georgia. Now, I wouldn't necessarily put that in there because a lot of drivers are just looking to get out of Dallas. So they're not going to specify anywhere that they are looking to go. So you don't necessarily have to specify because that's going to limit the... search results that you get to people that are looking specifically to get somewhere over to Atlanta, Georgia, or somewhere in that state or in that zone, depending on what you put here. But if it was just me, personally, I would leave this open because I don't care. I mean, I do care if we found somebody that was looking specifically to go to Georgia. That's great. But, you know, at this point, we just want to look at drivers in Dallas, because most of the time a driver is not going to really care where they go, as long as it's somewhere that is going to be in a good location so that they can easily find their next load. So they're not going to specify if you put their truck. here available in DAT if they show their truck is available in DAT they're not gonna post I want to go to Georgia no they just want to go somewhere where they can pick up another decent load okay I'm hoping that makes sense so I'm not gonna put anything here I'm just going to search okay and then this is gonna show me all the trucks available today for for today OK, so again, you know, you can filter trucks. Here's all the flatbeds, you know. So I would start calling. I would start calling. They're in Dallas. These are people that are in Dallas or around Dallas. Twenty one miles out, three miles out, twenty ninety. All of these people we could call their destination. See some have anywhere. I wants to get to Maryland zones, which you should be familiar with zones now. um, you know, access, Texas, they want to access to Texas, so anywhere, so you just need to, um, you need to start calling these people, you know, more particularly the anywhere people, or people that are in whatever zone Georgia is in. I can't remember off the top of my head what zone Georgia is in, but you do have a zone map. So you should be able to check that and start calling guys. Okay. So that is how you use this feature in DAT. You just go to search trucks, information in, it'll pop up. If you see a truck that would work, for example, this one, you just click on it and their phone number information will, you know, be right there. Okay, so that's how it works. Same thing with truck stop. You know, the exact same process, but we can certainly walk through it. You know, that driver, I'm sorry, that shipper gave you two thousand dollars. Why is my truck stop not working? we go um dallas to atlanta okay so again I would just I would um start with a rate of seventeen you know um equipment flat better step deck let's say it's for today october twenty fourth the weight on it is going to be forty thousand pounds now with truck stop guys let me be clear about something truck stop and I think I've said this before already in the course but internet truck stop tends to quote lanes on the higher end you're going to find that it's always pretty much significantly higher whatever the average is on truck stop is going to be significantly higher than what it is on DAT for example going back over here, when we put in the information for Dallas to Atlanta, you remember it showed up as two thousand dollars, right? So if you go here to the rate insights, And let me just be clear about something. In order to get the rate sites, there is certain information you have to put in. You have to put in the origin, the destination, the equipment, and the date. You have to have all four of those factors in here. Otherwise, you will not be able to use the rate in site feature on TruckStop. Oh, well, OK, this is great. So, OK, well, let me just rephrase my words then. Normally, normally it will be significantly higher. I'm very surprised by this. Of course, the one time I do something like this, it comes out different. But typically, this is great. This is great. And this is right around where we are anyway. So this is great. But let me try to give another example. Since this just made me look kind of bad let's say you got a load from Bradenton to Dallas okay uh this lane is going for about twenty three ninety three on DAT let's see what it shows over here Bradenton to Dallas Okay. Perfect example. Okay. So note here from Bradenton, Florida to Dallas, Texas is going for about twenty three ninety three on DAT. However, in truck stop market average is twenty eight hundred. That's significantly higher. And that's typically how it works most of the time with these load boards. Why? You ask me. I have no clue. I don't know where truck stop is getting their numbers from. So I can't answer that for you. I just know that most of the time when you're comparing the lanes on both of these sites, truck stop is always, always, almost always significantly higher. So you want to keep that in mind if you only have one load board. If you're using internet truck stop, know that truck stop typically goes pretty high. um on their rates so if you find yourself using this to quote a shipper you don't necessarily want to go with whatever this average rate is you could come down some off of this because this is almost ridiculously high okay um if you have dat it's pretty accurate okay that's pretty accurate and then another thing you can do is you can take the median between these two okay so whatever comes between um Uh, twenty three, ninety three and twenty eight hundred, you know, you could meet somewhere in the middle, maybe go twenty five hundred, you know, somewhere around there. Okay. When quoting a shipper and or trying to move the load. Okay. Um, so yes, let's see. Oh, again, you know, going back to the example we had, which was Dallas to. atlanta all right so I actually quoted a decent rate for this lane so yeah Again, we would want to start at seventeen, you know, put it out there for seventeen. The phone's going to ring and we're going to talk and we're going to start negotiating. We're going to know in the back of our head that our goal is for eighteen hundred. So if they are asking for a little bit more, you know, bump it up fifty dollars. If they need a little more, bump it up to eighteen. And if they're still saying no, we want to think about. you know, the demand, you know, are we getting a lot of phone calls? You know, if so, then we can perhaps let them pass that load up and just wait for the next phone call, you know, um, or if, you know, they're the first person that's called us all day and it's getting late in the day and, you know, nobody else has called about this load. We may want to be willing to give them a little bit more and just, uh, be slightly under, uh, what our expected profit margin is okay um so that is it guys uh last other thing show you how to search for trucks on um stop you're just wanting to come up here guys in the upper left hand corner and you're going to drop down which is search searching you're going to go to trucks It's just pretty much the same process, guys. You're going to put the information in here. I'm sorry. You can click New Search, and then you want to put the origin of where the truck needs to be, wherever your load is here. You can put the radius here, a hundred and fifty miles, two hundred, whatever have you. Again, I'm going to leave the destination blank. You're going to choose flatbeds and stepdecks, which is FSD in Internet Truck Stop. And you can hit adding, oh, well, you can pick the, I'm sorry, put the pickup date here. Okay. And load size, you can add that if you want. That will be a full load. And we're going to add. If load needed to be tarred, you could check that. Okay. And then you're just going to add and close. And then here we go. We have companies. We have the trailer types here, phone number, trailer types, available dates, where they are right now. Okay. Destination is blank. This particular one is trying to get to Memphis, Tennessee, which is not far from Georgia, but This is it, guys. Okay. And again, you see somebody that might work, you know, you're going to Oh, trailer van, van or flatbed. Okay. So in the event that you see In the event that you see for trailer types, VF, this is saying that they have trailers in that area that are vans and that are flatbeds. Because if you notice, the company here, Road King something, they've got a couple of listings. All of these are them. And Dallas, Dallas, Longview, Longview, Dallas. That means that they've got a couple of flatbeds and vans in that area. is likely what that means, okay? So you could certainly call just to clarify, hey, I need a flatbed in Dallas. Do you have that available, okay? Same thing with a step deck RGN, you know, commas, whatever the company is. It means that they've probably got a couple of step deck and RGN trailers in Weatherford, Texas, okay? And they're willing to go anywhere, So since the load, our load can go on a flatbed or a step deck, you can give them a call as well. Okay. It never hurts to call. Just say, hey, I saw your posting on truck stop. I need a step deck somewhere in the Dallas area for a load going to Georgia. Do you have anybody available for that? Okay. That's how that works, guys. This was a very quick video, but I did want you to understand how to use the load boards, how to post your load boards, how to negotiate rates, negotiating tactics, and also how to find trucks in the event that you have to get out there and do some extra leg work in case you've got a rough load that needs to be moved, okay? But that is going to conclude the end of this chapter. As always, I want to thank you for your time, and I will see you guys in the next video. all right everyone we now understand how to properly use the load board how to navigate through it and also how to post loads to the load board uh and that's something that you will come become more familiar with as time goes on you'll learn how to uh quickly navigate your way through and learn how whether different uh functions of the load board are which will make your job a whole lot easier it's going to take more time uh in the initial onset because you're not familiar with where the different items are that you're looking for the rate might be over here uh the uh the rate per mile might be here and then the total pay for the load might be right next to it and then way on the right side uh on a tab on the right hand side might be the weight and things like that. Then you'll have to click another button to view the details and it lists the commodity, it lists the size of the trailer and things like that that are needed. So as you continue to use the load boards, you'll become familiar with their functions and then that will make the flow much better. and help speed up the process of you finding a load for your particular drivers. All right, everyone, that will complete this module. of how to negotiate better rates, how to navigate through the load board, how to find drivers. And also remember that the rate that you see on the load board is not fixed in stone. You always, always, always want to try to get the most money you can for your drivers and for yourself. So I hope this information was helpful to you.